Facebook and WhatsApp Outage took the world by storm. Instagram was no exception and it also faced an outage. Users who were surprised in affected areas were given the message that something went wrong when attempting to access Facebook.
Although all these apps are now operational again after being offline for more than six hours due to a major outage, people are still speculating why it happened. It is now being called the Longest ever outage.
The outage of three social media platforms – Whatsapp, Facebook, and Instagram – which are all controlled by Facebook, stopped working before 5GMT on 4 October. The outage was worldwide and people stormed to Twitter and Snapchat to discuss it.
To clarify the matter, WhatsApp quickly came to Twitter and Tweeted:
Then shortly, everyone related to this chaos came to Twitter to clarify things.
Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram were Down: The longest Outage Ever
According to the Down Detector, 10.6 million people report the outage problem globally. They further added that it was the largest failure they had ever seen. No other outage has lasted six hours.
Pakistan Telecommunications Authority also came to Twitter to address this issue. According to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp services were disrupted worldwide because of an outage.
Facebook faced the stronger blow and Mark Zuckerberg was the main sufferer. A Whistleblower reported about the breakdown of social platforms and broke the news that the shares of Facebook went down. They slipped 5.3% in afternoon trading on Monday. It was the worst day for them in the whole year.
According to security experts, The breakdown could be the result of an internal mistake.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone tweeted that We are aware of people’s problem that they are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We apologize for this inconvenience and we are trying hard to get that operational as soon as possible.
All internal tools were unavailable, said a Facebook employee.
Then after six hours, Facebook services were resumed.
According to people familiar with the situation, Facebook’s response was made more difficult due to the employees who lost access to some of their own tools during the shutdown. Many employees were unaware of the situation.
Some Apps that are connected to Facebook or Facebook credentials used in the log-in to the third-party apps such as Match Masters and Pokemon Go were facing the same issues.
Match Masters tweeted that There has been an issue with the Facebook login servers and if your app is not running, as usual, please note that the moment facebook servers got fixed you will back to normal.
Read, Instagram Reel Length has been Extended to 60 seconds.
The internet outage in June, which took down many of the world’s top websites, recovered within an hour. In that case, the afflicted content delivery company blamed it on software that was triggered by a customer who changed a setting.
Experts’ views about the Facebook and WhatsApp outage:
Many people depend on WhatsApp, Facebook, or Instagram as their mode of communication.
Instagram Tweeted:
Losing access for an extended period can leave them vulnerable to criminals or hackers taking advantage of the outage and can hack their data, said Rachel Tobac, a hacker and CEO of SocialProof Security.
Tobac told about the multiple scams that happened in the previous outage. Some people received emails to restore their social accounts and by clicking such links they can access the personal data.
The cause of the outage is still unknown. According to Malory, Facebook appears to have removed “authoritative DNS routes” that allowed the rest of the internet to communicate with its properties. These routes are included in the internet’s Domain Name System that decides about the internet traffic that where they should go. DNS converts a domain name such as “facebook.com” to an IP address such as 123.45.67.890. If Facebook’s DNS records were to vanish, apps and web addresses would be unable to find it.
The Chief technical officer of cybersecurity, Jake Williams said that chances are that the outage is caused by the operational issue due to human error.
Madory said after considering all the evidence Facebook was to blame, and he dismissed the possibility that another major internet player, such as a telecommunications company, had inadvertently rewritten major routing tables that affect Facebook. “No one else announced these routes,” Madory explained.
Mike Schroepfer tweeted that Facebook is coming live but it will take time to get it 100%.
WhatsApp also tweeted to announce that the services are back on track.
Effects of Facebook and WhatsApp Outage:
When Whatsapp, Facebook, and Instagram were down, the Signal App gained millions of new followers. The company tweeted that millions of people joined the Signal app during the outage period. Due to the huge influx, their services got affected as well. Its calling and messaging were going well but some people could not find their all contacts on Signal. This happened due to millions of people joined the app. Then after some time, the app fixed this problem.
During the six hours of the outage, reports are coming that Mark Zuckerberg has faced a loss of 6 billion dollars and he is no longer on the list of the top 5 richest people in the world due to Facebook and WhatsApp outage. Facebook stock fell by 4.9 percent due to outage on Monday, adding a drop of 15% since September. Now, Mark Zuckerberg is the 6 richest person in the world.
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